by Neha Yazmin
POISON BLOOD
Book 1: Revelation
NEHA YAZMIN
Copyright 2012 Neha Yazmin
Smashwords Edition
British English (BrE)
* * *
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious, and resemblance to any real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
* * *
All rights reserved by the author.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any forms, or by any means, without the prior permission of the author.
* * *
sites.google.com/site/nehayazminbooks
nehayazmin.blogspot.co.uk
facebook.com/NehaYazmin
twitter.com/NehaYazmin
www.smashwords.com/profile/view/nehayazmin
* * *
~ Also by Neha Yazmin ~
Paranormal Romance:
Poison Blood, Book 2: Absolution
~
Contemporary Romance:
Chasing Pavements
Make You Feel My Love
* * *
~ Dedication ~
I would like to dedicate the entire Poison Blood series to my niece and nephew, aged 9 and 8 at the time I started writing these books. My nephew helped think of names for some of the characters and my niece always listened to my ideas. Even though you have to wait a few years before you can read these books, I hope you enjoy them when you do.
Black Roses
Black roses do not exist in nature.
They symbolise death and rebirth.
Chapter 1: I am a vampire
I don’t know what blood tastes like to a human. I’d never even licked a tiny drop of it from a pricked finger, let alone suck on a bleeding cut. The shedding of blood, my own, or anyone else’s, always made me scream or panic in fear and revulsion.
Now it’s my only food source.
And it smells and tastes so sweet. Feels like warm, liquid-velvet caressing my burning throat. Is that ironic? Is that the right word - ironic? Or is it just plain funny? Perhaps it would add further comic value if I said I’d been a vegetarian. But I wasn’t.
Unlike mortals, who need to eat, or at least drink something to stay alive, I can go without any form of nutrition for months on end. Well, for all of eternity really, because I’m not mortal. I am immortal.
I cannot die.
Yes, I can be killed, not very easily mind you, but my destruction is not impossible. Just not from starvation. Not directly from starvation, anyway. The thing is, if I were to deprive myself of blood for a prolonged period of time, I would get myself into a lot of trouble.
Which would then get me killed.
Abstaining from my natural food source indefinitely won’t harm me physically. It will only drive me slightly insane with thirst and desperation. Like a drug addict going cold turkey outside the confines of a rehab clinic, I will stand out like an elephant in Central London. Jittery. Shaky. Anxious. Delirious.
If within a few miles of another human, I will latch onto his scent and hunt him down within seconds and drain the life out of him in the middle of the street. Desperate to sink my sharp - but not pointy, or in any way abnormal - teeth into his warm neck pulsating with a blood-filled vein, I won’t care if the entire world watched me kill my prey.
But I can’t let myself get into that situation. Can’t risk exposing us. Our existence is the one thing we have to keep secret. It would change the world, alter the balance of the Universe, if humankind was to discover that we walk among them and have been for millennia. Probably as long as they have walked this earth. I don’t know for sure - history wasn’t my strongest subject at school.
Consumed with thirst and bloodlust to the point of no return however, I won’t give a damn about secrecy and the natural order of things. It will be the last thing on my mind. Well, the only things on my mind will be thirst and blood, blood and thirst. How to get the blood. How to quench the burning thirst.
Once I calm down though, with a full body of warm blood in my system, and my senses return to me, that’s when I’ll wish I wasn’t even born. Or reborn. I’ve broken the ultimate rule. I’ve exposed my kind.
I will be destroyed.
I’d think about running, hiding, but all the time, hundred percent certain that I might as well just stand on the spot. It wouldn’t be the humans I’d be trying to escape from. No, I’d be out of their sight before they even blinked. Instead, I’d be terrified of others of my species. The ones that deal with someone who has breached the very law they exist to enforce.
Justice would be delivered by The System.
No matter where I go and who I hide behind - not that anyone would stand between me and my inevitable end - The System will find me and annihilate me. Swiftly and in such a way that the watered down version of my demise at their invincible and merciless hands will teach the next few generations of my kind to unconditionally honour the one law we have to abide by.
Keep us a secret.
They’re everywhere, The System, but I believe their HQ is somewhere in America, with offices in the world’s most densely populated regions. Regions most populated by humans are also the places most populated by us. Have to be where the food is. Where our hunting activities won’t dent the statistics too much.
The European headquarters of my kind’s governing body is of course London, where I reside (though I’m originally from Reading, Berkshire - I moved to London after I changed), and I can almost feel their many eyes watching me, waiting in the shadows, ready to pounce the moment they suspect I am about to shatter everything they stand for.
Protecting our world from discovery.
As my luck would have it though, I still hate blood, and I worry that’s an anomaly that might pique their interest in me. I can’t help it, I’d tell them. I don’t understand it either. It’s just as bizarre to me as it is to you.
I wouldn’t be the first girl in the world who was scared of blood as a human, nor will I be the last, and yet, when blood is the only thing that I should care about, love even, I still can’t stomach the thought of consuming it. I just totally abhor it. Totally. So much so that I can’t associate the word drink with the name of the red liquid that once used to get pumped around my body by my once-beating heart.
Sure, when the crimson wet stuff is in my icy-cold, pale white, un-dead body, gushing down my desert-dry mouth and through my burning, aching throat and swimming inside my system, it feels like heaven. Euphoric.
The strength and power it adds to my already indestructible frame. The further heightening of my super-human senses. The gentle flush of my cheeks, like a blush following a sweet comment from a cute boy. The lightening of the dark purplish-blue circles framing my beetle-black eyes which then glow red. The slight dulling of the burning in my throat, a burn that I have to live with, control every day of my existence… All this brings a momentary release and relief.
And then it’s gone.
I am full of shame and regret and disgust and self-loathing. Not much guilt though, because whenever I… whenever I decide to satiate my thirst - just enough to keep me from going crazy and crash-banging onto The System’s radar - I don’t kill anyone. Or even hurt them.
I steal from a hospital’s blood bank.
There should be some guilt, I know, for depleting from the stores of a hospital’s blood supply. What if the plastic bag of blood I took for my personal use was the only one they had of that particular rare blood type and they needed it for an emergency? And the patient died because of me? Just because I don’t go out murdering for my needs, perhaps I am inadvertently killing people anyway.
This is another thing that I shouldn’t be thi
nking. I shouldn’t have a conscience, something close to humanity, not this soon into my new life. It takes my kind centuries to rediscover their former selves, and even then it’s only vestiges of the personality they once had. A shadow of the person they used to be. We don’t open our new red eyes, still thinking and feeling like we did before we changed.
But I did.
I awoke with the same conscience and emotions and feelings and soul - well, I think I still have my soul - of the 17-year-old girl I will be forever.
And with the same dislike for my new and only source of nutrition.
The rest of my species hunt for their meals, and even if they knew about my blood bank trick, I don’t think they would give up hunting. I imagine it’s like a sport to most of them, an easy one, yet as satisfying as if it were the most challenging game in the world. They see themselves as predators and humans as their only prey.
Clearly, I don’t see it that way.
I don’t think we have a right to take lives. I don’t see myself as anything other than me. Elisia Dalton, or more commonly known as, Ellie. I don’t quite integrate with the people I choose not to kill, but I don’t need to stay clear of them either. Most of my kind has to keep their distance from the mortal population during the day, keep out of temptation’s way. Can’t risk being seen in broad daylight with their would-be meal/victim. Not that the police would be able to catch them of course, but The System would find and end them in a heartbeat if they aroused any suspicion.
By night however, they move more comfortably and freely through the city, scouting for strays. Someone ambling too far behind their friends after a night of binge-drinking. A recently-single girl taken in by the unashamedly good-looking guy at the bar who seems to be falling for her. Even a girl who you thought was out of your league, agreeing to go somewhere quieter so she could talk to you properly, really hear what you have to say, listen to your problems, and suggesting her place.
Hunting can go on all night because we don’t sleep, but we can’t actually break into say, the flat of a girl who clearly lives alone. We actually have to be invited in by the person who lives in the house, otherwise we can’t enter. Some weird magic or curse which doesn’t necessarily even the playing field, but it means our meals won’t exactly be handed to us on a plate.
It’s also important to not over-indulge with the feeding - too many corpses, or missing persons in any one locale, would alert The System. Therefore everyone is forced to hunt tactically and move around the country a lot.
So what do I do when I’m not participating in all the activities that others of my kind thrive in? Where do I live? Well, I don’t have a flat - I don’t have a job or that kind of money. And who would give a 17-year-old her own flat anyway? But I don’t really need shelter or even a shower. I don’t need something soft to sleep on.
I don’t need a home.
Pretending to be a teenage runaway, I hang out on the underground. The brightly-lit, bustling train platforms and busy stations. Away from the sunlight, away from the real world. Sometimes, I ride the tube, sitting inside the carts as well as on top of the trains. Most of the time, I sit in the bright red or orange seats on the platforms, my grey hood pulled over my face, and observe the commuters, listen in on any conversations they engage in.
When I get bored, I borrow a book. Not from a library, but the shops in the larger train stations like Liverpool Street Station in the heart of the city of London, Euston Station, or London Paddington… And when I say borrow, I don’t mean steal. I do sort of take the book without paying it for it, but I always return it after I’m done.
So it really is borrowing.
The best part about borrowing a book from a shop, which is also the best part about buying a book from a shop, is the choosing part. Running your hands over the covers, the smell of the paper, reading the blurbs. Picking the same book up several times and putting it down, before eventually deciding it’s the one. I still indulge in this, and once I know which book I’m going to borrow, I leave the shop.
Two or three minutes later, I run back in, grab the book, and run out. No one sees me, I’m that quick - well, we’re all that quick, but I fancy I’m a little faster than the average. Our speed makes us invisible when we really exert ourselves. No one hears anything. No one has any idea where the hell one of the copies of the latest bestseller went. One might feel a little hint of a breeze as I enter and exit the store, but it passes so quickly that I’m sure they doubt it was even a breeze.
My scent however, does sort of linger in the shop, and I fear one of the cashiers has sort of picked up on it. I see and hear him sniff at the air and then smile to himself whenever he sees I’m in the store. I try not to steal/borrow books when he’s around - he might just be a little too attuned to my scent. What if he can smell the same fragrance in the whisper of wind I create when I whiz in for the book and whiz out?
So what if he does? would be the response of a fellow immortal. Smile at him, lure him away, kill him. Then you’re back to zero people who are suspicious of you. Of course, I would refuse to do such a thing. Even to protect my secret from him, I can’t kill the guy.
What about The System? I can’t let them find out that some cashier suspects I’m not quite what I seem. To prevent that from happening, for self-preservation, would I take a human life?
No, no I wouldn’t and I can’t force myself to accept that I should.
I can’t accept any of it. Can’t enjoy any of it and I just don’t get it. I should at least enjoy… enjoy drinking the icky scarlet liquid for a little longer than a quick second. I shouldn’t feel like gagging afterwards, contemplate puking it out again. I ought to live for it. Thrive on the thrill of the hunt, the kill, the feast. This is me. This is what I am.
I am a vampire.
Chapter 2: I’m never coming back
Of course I’m a vampire. A 17-year-old vampire girl. I’ve been 17 for 18 months - I was a couple of weeks away from my 18th birthday when I was changed, and I’ve been an immortal for half a year now. My friends would say I’m living their dreams. They are completely obsessed with becoming vampires, though they have no idea that it’s very possible.
Unlike my friends from college, I didn’t think vampires were cool or sexy. Grudgingly, I did agree that it would be bloody brilliant to be super-strong, move at lightning speed, hear everything three miles down the road, smell every fragrance in a room and identify each of them individually.
But not at the cost of having to actually live on blood.
Now that I have all these incredible abilities, I still don’t get the appeal. Clearly, I haven’t embraced this new life yet. I don’t know if I ever will.
I didn’t celebrate my 18th birthday. Who would I celebrate with? I don’t have any friends or family anymore. Don’t worry, I didn’t kill them - in fact, they’re all very much alive and healthy back in Reading - I just can’t see them now. Not because I’m still a newborn vampire, still in my first year when we are thirstiest and strongest and most obsessed with blood. When we have virtually no control over ourselves and live only to kill and drink, drink and kill. No, because I am not the typical newly created immortal. I can manage, or rather, suppress my thirst and not be ruled by it completely.
Most importantly, I can abstain. For months. Until breaking point. And I give up the fast only to avoid utter tragedy. The killing of a human (the person I feed off in my deranged, blood-starved state) and a vampire (me at the ruthless hands of The System).
The reason I have to stay away from my friends is because they’d notice something isn’t quite right with me. The changes they would see in the teenager they once knew would be startling to say the least.
I wasn’t the prettiest girl in my local sixth-form college, but I wasn’t ugly. Now though, with my pale white, pearl-smooth skin, natural grace and stillness, alluring charisma, and always-glossy dark brown, wavy hair, I am simply beautiful. A perk of this new life that I fail to find any enthusiasm for. Perhaps because I
was never all that vain, didn’t think beauty was skin deep, and looking great didn’t top my list of priorities.
My eyes being coal black wouldn’t be too much of an issue, I suppose - I can say they are not the usual light brown because I am wearing coloured contacts. And not because I haven’t had a meal in weeks and so the eyes which should be mortifyingly crimson have become beetle-black.
Maybe I can even explain away the new skin tone - plastic surgery, mismatched foundation, or even say that I secretly loved vampires after all and this is my new vampire look. A new, limited edition designer perfume would suffice as an explanation for my scent - floral, with a hint of vanilla and strawberries.
But the cold, hard skin. The voice that sounds like music and bells. How would I talk my way out of that? And if they were fooled by whatever excuse I made for every little difference they queried, wouldn’t they become a little suspicious as to why I only ever saw them in the night? Not that I would burn in the sunlight. No, I would simply start sparkling like a diamond, my skin seemingly embedded with reflective surfaces whenever it’s exposed to sunshine.
So, as well as staying as far away from humans and sunlight as possible, I have to stay away from my old life. My family.
My mother. Oh, thinking about her makes me mad! Makes me think of the night, 6 months ago, when I ran away from home.
We’d always had a troubled relationship, me and mum, especially when I hit my teens. Nothing strange in that, of course. Few of my friends often said they hated their mums. I didn’t hate mine. I do now. I did that night I left home. That night, a fortnight from the biggest milestone of my life so far - my 18th birthday - she told me about my father.